The inventive concept relates generally to electronic data storage technologies. More particularly, the inventive concept relates to semiconductor memory devices having a low power operating mode.
There is an ever increasing demand for low power electronic devices and related components. This demand has arisen from a variety of factors, such as the proliferation of mobile devices with limited battery life, a need to reduce heat in certain applications, a general demand to conserve power, and many others.
Many efforts for reducing power consumption have focused on lowering the driving voltage of electronic devices. However, in certain devices, such as semiconductor memory devices, lowering the driving voltage can lead to unstable operation. For example, where a lowered driving voltage is used to input and output data from a memory cell in a semiconductor device, the operational stability of the semiconductor memory device may be degraded due to a lowered read margin.